An Introduction to Spotify’s Genres of the Future
Spotify has several curious genres within its database, including some which are characterized by the word future. Namely, the following selection:
- Future Funk
- Kawaii Future Bass
- Futurepop
- Future Ambient
- Future Garage
It is definitely not clear if these genres are connected by something more than just their name. We’ll explore why these genres are called the way the are, and if a (strong) connection might actually tie these genres together. This will consist of exploring the aspects of the music within each genre first, after which we will properly compare the 5 genres by defining a suitable corpus and providing insightful visualizations of the audio analysis data provided by the Spotify API.
Some sound samples from the different genres (in fact, these playlist together are the entire corpus).
A Future of Sounds, Rhythms and Timbres
A Short Examination of the Genres
Future Funk and Kawaii Bass
From exploring the genres and listening to some excerpts of their music, we can quickly suspect that the future description might mean something entirely different per genre. In the case of Future Funk and Kawaii Future Bass, it seems to refer to a futuristic pop-y sound, with a distinct electronic feel, although real (sampled) instruments and some vocals (often with light-hearted lyrics) now and then are common too, especially in Future Funk. Future Kawaii Bass sets itself apart from Future Funk with extensive use of chiptune sounds and strong upbeat rhythms.
Futurepop
Futurepop lies on the complete other end of the spectrum however, with dark low synths and rhythms characterizing its sound. These support raw, unedited vocals with lyrics I could only describe as “desperate”. I believe that if the Future in its name refers to anything else than the extensive usage of synthesized sounds, it would refer to a distinctively dystopian and dark impression of the future.
Future Garage and Future Ambient
Future Garage and Future Ambient could both in a certain way be described as minimalistic. They use little instruments, which often repeat short musical fragments thoughout the whole song in a relatively low tempo. Strong drum grooves give structure to the songs, in which generally no distinctive melody or vocal part is present, especially in Future Ambient. There, slow reverberized synth sounds and sweeps give color to tracks. In this regard, Future Garage is certianly different. It features these synths too, but also contains a lot more acoustic “real” instruments, albeit often sampled, and the occasional “smooth” melody line. For both genres, the Future seems simply to be an indication of the electronical style and heavy usage of sampling.
The Corpus
The collections of songs we’ll analyze, our corpus, will naturally be a selection of songs from artist from each of these genres. Large names such as Snail’s House (who has in fact been credited to be the pioneer of Kawaii Future Bass, but is also listed as a Future Funk artist) will be of particular interest and multiple songs will be included, but some genres such as future ambient consist of mostly smaller artist, where a smaller and more varied selection of songs from different artist is more appropriate.
It could also be helpful to compare some of the outliers of the genre, but care must be taken to ensure those artist would actually belong to the genre, instead of their appearance being based solely on Spotify’s automatic assignment. If not, it will be more useful to exclude them from the research, as they would negatively interfere with making valid comparisons between the genres.
For now, I used playlist largely based on playlists provided by the Every Noise at Once website (http://everynoise.com/), each around 50 tracks long.
| Genre | Song Count |
|---|---|
| Future Ambient | 50 |
| Future Funk | 49 |
| Future Garage | 50 |
| Futurepop | 50 |
| Kawaii Future Bass | 49 |
First Investigations
Description
An important finding of our preleminary research was the large devations of musical style between the genres. To me, valence seemed to be a logical choice for comparison, as I felt like the genres sounded most distict in this regard. The graph shows the average valence of the songs from each genre, as well as the value of each individual song in the form of a scatter plot. Additionally, the colour displays the energy value of the tracks, another feature I felt would provide contrast between the genres. Lastly, the size of each point gives an indication of the liveness of the track, as provided by Spotify.
Results
Surprisingly, we can see Futurepop actually has a somewhat high average, even higher than Kawaii Future Bass, something I think one would not concluded based on listening to the selections. As expected, Future Funk and Kawaii Future Bass do in general seem to be assigned higher valence values than Future Ambient and Future Garage.
Chromagrams
Description
Here we can see a chromagram of a single somewhat representative song for every genre. In order, they are:
- Forever (Original Club Mix) - Bruderschaft
- Ji-Eun’s Sunset - City Girl
- Hot Milk - Snail’s House
- (others are W.I.P.)